M Files - Controlling the Balance

The "M Files," as pompous as it may sound, will be a series of disclosed secret files about the things that MagicDuel helped me research and understand. From time to time, information that becomes stable and is no longer an uncertain experiment will be documented in such a file. Beware, the things described here may seem odd or superstitious to most, but remember they are research. Some of the discussed topics may spoil other current ongoing secrets or experiments if you are smart enough to make the right connections. This lecture is dedicated to the most loyal veteran players of you all.

I do not have the habit of writing little texts when I speak of the things that I enjoy most, so take a coffee before you continue to read this.

The reason I do write all this is because, as stated on the main page, MagicDuel learns from you and you should learn from it. The veteran players should hear my side of the story; they deserve this for all the effort and time invested. It is my gift to them that reaches from a virtual world called MagicDuel to another world called Life. The knowledge accumulated by this project is applicable from games and communities to understanding the human mind and much more than that.

When I say this is dedicated to veterans, I mean it, because you won't be able to understand all of it if you are not a long time player of MagicDuel, or if your mind is not open to information that might not fit with the way you learned things work.

Before attempting to understand any of the things I have to say in the "M Files," you must know some things about me. Yeah, I am that egocentric to ask you to do that. I am not a superstitious man, but my sphere of understanding reaches fields that may be considered, by most people, as superstitious or way too abstract or unreal. I do not blindly believe in anything, not even in the things I research and prove on my own. I always keep an open gate to the collected information so that I can always improve and perfect it based on any possible new input I might get later. I do not manage to apply the things I discover to my own life, so do not look at me as a model. I have my flaws and, trust me, they are big enough. I am not a bad or cruel person, yet being able to decide things in a neutral and highly objective way sometimes makes me look the opposite, as weird as it is. I tend to be very enthusiastic in the things I talk about, and that might seem to some as obsession or insanity. I leave it for your own judgement to understand the things I say with or without this enthusiasm factor. MagicDuel is my little baby and it's normal to speak of it with such enthusiasm, but don't let this obscure the information I have to say "for they are true and powerful." :)

It took me several years to decide this information is ripe enough to go public: value it accordingly.

Enough introduction. A balanced, closed world

MagicDuel is what I call a balanced, nearly self-sufficient world. It has certain gates and it depends on them, like the constant influx of new players. But at this point, these gates are weaker than the power of the realm itself, meaning that new players cannot change or destroy the balance we achieved here, though old players can.

We find such consistent worlds all over us. They are like systems within systems, however, it's very rare to find a nearly self-sufficient system in our daily life. Partial system are all over, systems like work, family, and so on, and we even sometimes refer or think of them as a small world.

The advantage of controlling a complete system is that you can analyze its behavior and gather knowledge that you can't by analyzing partial systems. The purpose of this document is to explain some particularities discovered and analyzed over the time within the world of MagicDuel. A very powerful and interesting way to use such knowledge is in our daily life and, of course, in partial systems, because even if they are not complete, they follow the same abstract rules.

I will reference geometric shapes because it's much easier for me. What I will talk about also contains a special kind of intuitive information that some of you might understand. If you do not understand the references to shape I will use, do not worry, not many can or should. Principle of balance applied on information

The principles are indeed applied to everything. One very interesting and powerful thing is that the Balance principle applies to pure information, too.

There is no ideal world except one and that's the entire world. By "ideal" I mean actually absolute, and one thing that is absolute must be everything, meaning that this ideal absolute world should also contain imperfection just to be absolute, and it does.

Spotting out the imperfection in a perfect system is a vital thing to do. There is no complete thing without imperfection, this goes from programming to philosophy. Understanding where the imperfection is gives so much more power to the part we consider perfect. For example, this theory in practice means that you must always search for mistakes in your own theories and be aware of them, never consider a thing perfect. It's quite a paradox if you think of it, but the path to perfection is never-ending; you can't reach perfection, you must only go towards it. If you reach it somehow, it just means you decided to ignore the imperfections over a certain level.

Everything around us is built out of information. From thoughts to matter. Yes, matter is also information because matter can be reduced to pure energy, and energy can end up the bearer of information that is built by information.

Controlling the information balance is probably one of the wildest things I ever researched, but I am confident such research is of great importance to understand many other things related--and even unrelated--to it. Balancing or Unbalancing a system

Once you understand the mechanics of a system you can "play" with it. You can drop in small abnormalities and see what changes and what remains stable. In MagicDuel's case, I kind of understand its underlying mechanics, but it's a mechanics I rarely made public to anyone (no it's not about fighting system!). More on this shortly.

How can you balance a system? How can you unbalance it? It's not that easy to destroy. In fact, it's just an illusion that it's easy to destroy. What is easy to do is to attempt to destroy. Complete destruction and creation are actually two things that are quite well-balanced. Creating something proved to be the same difficulty as fully destroying something. Attempting to create something proved to be as easy as attempting to destroy something, without stable results.

If you have for example a pendulum (like a weight bound to a piece of string) and it's oscillating, moving a lot, how do you balance it? How do you stop it? You do that by bringing in information that is opposing the system. The "system" in this case is the oscillating movement of the pendulum. Opposite information would not be in the same direction like the system, but up and down. Move the oscillating pendulum up and down and you will see it will become stable and still eventually (this same technique is used in crane operating).

You can balance or unbalance a system in two ways: one is by adding information and one is by diluting the system. Adding information is simple, as long as you understand what information the system already holds.

How can you "dilute" a system? By increasing its step. This is actually a temporary solution. It's like having a drop of ink in a glass of water--you can make the ink disappear by adding more water to the glass. Some systems that are very complex are more easily controlled by controlling the speed and quantity of the information that flows in, or by simply expanding the size. Example is the fighting system in MagicDuel. It's a complex system, I managed to make it stable, or at least more stable than it could be, by increasing its complexity, not necessarily in the right direction. I could have made it a lot more unstable by cutting down its complexity (system would have been much more predictable and abusable). The fighting system in MagicDuel is probably the most messed up system in the realm, but it was never supposed to be a perfect system :D One common dot

You can imagine all subsystem within a system as circles, and all these circles connect in one point that can be anywhere on their length. The geometrical shape of this is the same shape I could analyze and find in real world: a hypersphere. At the risk of sounding conceited, I dare say that I am one of the few people who can imagine a hypersphere with the same accuracy as one else could imagine a sphere. That probably helped me a lot to understand some mechanics behind all this and build upon it.

For the sake of "simplicity," if you can call this simple, let's imagine these things as circles on a sphere (it's much clearer than a hypersphere for most). I said all these subsystems are part of the same sphere, the system we analyze, and all have one point in common. This point is like the glue that holds the system in place and is nothing more than a virtual drop of imperfection to balance the circle which is, by its nature, perfect. You can rapidly tell that this virtual drop can actually be a huge gap in some highly imperfect system. But it's important to realize that it's there all the time. There will always be a similarity between all the imperfections of all subsystems within a system.
In case of MagicDuel it took me a very long time to define and find it, and I admit I am still working to perfect that as much as I can.

This point can be controlled from every circle of each subsystem. Controlling this point can affect the entire system! Imagine, for example, an error in the battle system, or in the chat, or anywhere actually, it will slowly destroy the balance of the entire MagicDuel world. Take for example a plant: repeatedly damage an end of one of its branches and you will notice that the plant decides to kill the entire branch (please don't try this at home; plants are beautiful and important parts of life).

The results you can achieve with this are unbelievable: you can control information that you have NO access to just by controlling the balance between this error point and the rest. One thing that I was initially afraid to talk about because most will react against it, I'll talk about on the next page Aiming the information gap (the error dot)

Each system is connected to the other systems around it. As I said earlier, MagicDuel, as a nearly self-sufficient world, has a gate too. Without this "point" in its structure, "a gate" as I call it, the system will be more stable, but also dying and consuming itself until it vanishes.

I managed to control the MagicDuel world in such a way that it will balance to its outer world through this point. Now this sounds like science fiction probably, but how many of you have had the feeling that the simple fact you found MagicDuel was the work of fate? How many of you were so strongly convinced you "had to" find MagicDuel in this big internet world? Quite  a few, and I don't say this because I feel so proud of MagicDuel, but because, being its creator, I seen lots and lots of such comments sent to me about how MagicDuel was found or what it means to some. MagicDuel has a way of attracting players and reaches out from its own system into systems it does not control, and it does this by causing a subtle imbalance in the surrounding information. Some of the information present in the MagicDuel realm counterbalances the gaps some of you feel in yourselves, and because of that, you could call it fate that you found it, but I will say that it found you.

It's a certain feeling you have when you come to this virtual world. You know there is something there, not sure what, but you feel it. Some feel it stronger than others and they do more and more just to stay and see what it is all about. Some feel it weaker than others and, eventually, some things make them give up the search and quit at some point. Some keep their "gates" to the soul closed and they never feel this strange attraction> Some do not need the information here so they are unaffected by this subtle imbalance.

In other words, this imbalance control can be found, for example, when you hide something. If you hide something without any possible way of reaching it, it will somehow emerge "by fate." You need to create "keys" and clues to that big secret in order to keep it balanced to the outer world; that's something very important to know. Realizing the overall balance of information allows you to predict certain areas of possible imbalance and use them in your favor or fill in the gaps.

What is important to understand is that "information balance" also affects systems that are not connected to each other. It's "karma." It's not about religion or superstition, it's about a native instinct humans have in feeling this balance even on a subconscious level. Playing with information

MagicDuel is a game for me as it is for you, but not in the same sense. I do play with information balance in the game, but I am not mocking or fooling you into things just to see "an interesting reaction." If I provide wrong information to a system, the results I analyze will be also fictive, so I need to be sure that the information I place in is true enough not to ruin MagicDuel.

That's one of the main reasons I started to be so against Ancient Lore. At the point of its creation, the lore had as purpose: the general feeling you had after hearing about it. But some of you got lost in the details, creating a separate subsystem within MagicDuel, a system that even if it's somehow fun, interfered with my main system. The results of a subsystem present within the realm becomes, from time to time, obvious and I will not go into detail because I do not want to harm the reputation of any of you.

How do you put information into a complexly balanced world?
It's the same thing when you ask, "What are the lines that give a painter's masterpiece its beauty?" You can't define them! MagicDuel is the same as a beautiful painting: it has a message, a theme, a feeling of its own, and--against popular belief--I am not controlling every bit of information of the system, not at all. It's enough to place the right questions and create the right "bed" for the information to come and "rest" in. The system will build itself.
In MagicDuel, I measure information by a very uncommon measuring unit: human minds. The colors I use to paint the masterpiece are people, people that I manage to select by having a series of filters during their initial stages.
I could train them, it's true, but over internet, I can't. They must be filtered out and leave statistics and chance to be controlled by MagicDuel subtle information balance, a much slower process to get the right people into this realm.

How can a person influence the realm?
That probably has an obvious answer, but not the one I will give you now. There's also a certain information balance between a player's mind and the other systems that person role-plays to be part of. Creating a character within the realm (as opposed to just create a test account), makes the bridge between your collection of knowledge and ability to process knowledge and the MagicDuel world. I just provide the tools needed to make all these "bridges" point in the same direction. Tools

I have several tools to achieve all this information balance control. They can be divided in two: tools that help strengthen the connection between you and MagicDuel, and tools that allow you to connect to the other minds in MagicDuel.

You have chat and things that express your personality, like papers, avatar, forum, etc. These are the tools used to create a channel between you and MagicDuel as a center of all the connections.

You have fights, beautiful artwork, upgradable creatures, stats, hidden secrets, etc. These are the tools used to strengthen your connection with MagicDuel, to attract you and keep you in until the pull force is enough to get you into the first set of tools.

Once you get to the communication part, and make friends and interact, the tools that kept you initially in become irrelevant. How important is it, for example, how beautiful or ugly the first page is for veterans?

Understanding this about a "game," or a nearly self-sufficient system or world, helps me to understand the tools that govern other systems and eventually the overall system called "the real world."

Sharing all this info with you is actually unbalancing MagicDuel's information balance quite a lot, and I have repeatedly done things that unbalance the realm, because, in my circle of perfection, I have my own points and flaws and without them, things will simply find other ways to self-balance by creating flaws in places I can't control or predict.

Embrace the inevitable so to speak The End

All things have an end. A linear evolution of a system is always pointing towards an end. MagicDuel has its end also, but if it will be in the next month, year, or when I will die, that I do not know. I just know it will end one day, as I know I myself will end one day.

I hope that its entire existence will be an unforgettable experience of immeasurable value :)  No, "hope" is actually a bad word for this--"hope" is when you have uncertainty. I do not have uncertainty in what I just said. What is more powerful than hope? It's said hope dies last... hmm... Ah yes, faith. If "hope" is the last to die, "faith" never dies. Faith is the only thing to combine in one feeling both the Question and the Answer; faith has nothing to do with religion actually.

If the world would be a circle with zero (number) at its base, Faith is where negative infinity combines with positive infinity at the exact balancing points standing opposite to zero. That specific point is the "error dot" or, better said, the control dot of the universe: the one thing that connects us to the rest, in the same way as subsystems connect to the big system they are part of.

Until the next M File I share with you, have fun.